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2M users but no money in the bank

exercism.org

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Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#61

Post by benreesman »

ozim wrote: post #58
benreesman wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s two million churned out dead accounts, non-replaced, and 800 actual people who care then the author of the post was posting in bad faith and I’d retract my remark. To get from 800 real people to two million user id rows one would be running some kind of spam scam, and if that’s the case I apologize.

I don't think it is case of spam scam. I do think they really can have legit sign ups, but people "wanting to learn code" usually fizzle out quick. I have my experience as a dev when friends/family/colleagues ask for guidance, I provide them with links resources and some mentoring and after 2-3 days they don't follow up ever again. But not using metric like daily active users, returning users, might indicate that the…

Oh I don’t doubt for a minute that there’s some gap here. But the key people are serious enough to list rigorous code review as a core value in the next breath after “I just stopped paying everyone including myself.”

If the millions of users thing is even a little real, that’s a galactically less risky play than friggin LangChain for Pets or whatever.

I hope I’m being paranoid but I get the sense that someone pissed off someone important.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#62

Post by [deleted] »

dspillett wrote: post #59
andrewstuart wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$50/month gets you a 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link on Ionos. https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps $7500/month would get them 150 such servers. Maybe they should cut the AWS costs and hire their developer back. Id be really interested to hear the breakdown of their AWS bill. It would be a crime if they were blowing what money they have giving Amazon 9 cents per gigabyte egress.

If they are self-managing all the extras you get with a decent cloud setup (backups, node failover, load distribution and auto-scaling, multi-region or at least multi-DC for availability beyond single node failures, …), they are going to need an infrastructure person as well as that developer. Preferably two so the one isn't effectively on-call 24/7. And for that multi-DC for availability thing: you might need someon…

[deleted]

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#63

Post by gwd »

bux93 wrote: post #12

What does "I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model" mean? Non-profits have costs they pay. Many famously outlive their founders. Many, like co-ops or credit unions, don't depend on donations/endowments. They have revenue greater than expenses as a matter of basic accounting?

It sounds like his model was: "Make a non-profit org to do something useful for society, get funding from orgs that have money and want useful things done"; and it sounds like the problem he had was that orgs that want useful things done are often too specific.

E.g., there are orgs to promote computer literacy among women; and among poor people in India; and among middle-schoolers in Africa, and so on. And he has users who are women, and who ware poor people in India, and who are middle-schoolers in Africa, and so on. But none of the orgs will give him a grant, because they can't guarantee the money will only be spent for their own target groups.

I can see why that would be kind of discouraging.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#64

Post by KoftaBob »

> I think it's fair to say that at this stage I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model working in a way that allows Exercism to reach any of its potential. Keeping something free for everyone relies on either the user being the product, or on significant donations, and without either, it's very hard to grow.

Non-profit =/= the product is free. The vast majority of hospitals and universities are non-profit, and their product/service sure as hell isn't free.

Nonprofits operate under a non-distribution constraint, meaning any surplus revenues must be reinvested into the organization's mission rather than distributed to private ownership.

What they've lost faith in is running a business with a free product.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#65

Post by throwaway2225 »

heeton wrote: post #41

I don’t know if Jeremy will see this, but: At my org it’s hard to get justification for donations. However if this was something like ~100$ a year or whatever per dev, I’d be paying it today for my team.

I remember reading an article about a non-profit discovering a work around for this problem.

They created a subscription plan that had no real value except maybe adding some trivial "feature" like a gold star next to their name (I don't remember the details). This made it possible for the companies to receive a standard invoice that had a greater chance of approval.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#66

Post by vidyesh »

mef wrote: post #9

out of money, final payroll, no alternative but to go into zombie mode, yet for the last few months the co-founder has been working on his next product which will launch in 2025. maybe everything that could have been tried was tried but this comes off like some of the effort spent working on the next company could have been spent keeping this one alive

They said they will be using the proceeds from that for-profile company to pay for a team member's salary and keep Exercism running as much as they can. So this next company could be considered to be an effort to keep this old one alive!

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#67

Post by slkjdlskjdklsd »

kelnos wrote: post #60
sealeck wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the tone of this comment is unnecessarily condemning (apologies if I am reading it incorrectly) – I can totally understand why someone who has worked for years on a non-profit business which has created a lot of value for people (I think exercism is pretty good software) might want to be able to at least pay themself.

Non-profit doesn't mean you didn't get to pay yourself. It just means that any revenue that exceeds expenses must be reinvested into the business.

That sounds like Amazon to me.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#68

Post by ihid »

choult wrote: post #29
EduardoBautista wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, exercism is a "not-for-profit organisation registered in the UK" according to the footer of their website. Edit: It appears that their "not-for-profit" message in their footer is a bit misleading, as explained by those who replied to my comment.

They're not officially a non-profit, they're a limited company. Obviously they can still operate as such - that's down to the board how they distribute profits via dividends, so they might choose to do so. A true non-profit company in the UK would be a registered Community Interest Company, or a registered Charity.

Hello. This isn't actually correct. Exercism is a Company Limited by Guarantee. It has no shareholders. It can't pay dividends.

Community Interest Companies do have sharedholders and can pay dividends. CIC's are definitely not charities in the scope of the word that you're using it.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#69

Post by re-thc »

fendy3002 wrote: post #48
Laaas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d think they’d use a cheaper hosting service if that’s literally the only thing preventing them from having positive gross profit.

honest questions, is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper?

> is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper?

Most have adopted EKS-like services i.e. kubernetes.

There is fly.io that's closer. Hope they improve on the reliability aspect.

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